Crippled
by Calico Kat
Summary: Ryu Hayabusa travels to the Mugen Tenshin village to visit his friend Hayate in the wake of tragedy, and speaks with Hayate's sister Kasumi. PreDOA1. [mxm]


Ryu Hayabusa had traveled the hidden paths to the Mugen Tenshin village many times since he had first arrived as a messenger one bone-chilling winter night nine years before. Even where the footing grew treacherous, where one misstep could send a shinobi tumbling over a thousand feet, Ryu could have walked them blind—once, he had. He had traversed them in every season, in thunderstorms and sleeting rain, in leisure and on dark business, but he could remember no day he'd fitted to the familiar footholds on business blacker than this.

The first time he saw the shinobi village, the moonlight reflected silver off the new fallen snow blanketing sturdy, traditional houses much like those of his own Hayabusa Village. Waiting on the doorstep of the Jōnin's house, Ryu meditated on stilling his shivering. The mountain winds had bitten deep and he was not yet a master of his own body temperature. Jōnin Shiden gratefully received the sealed message Ryu carried, ordered the young ninja to stay and rest the night, and left immediately along with his men. Shiden's wife, Ayame, welcomed him into her household. He woke up the next morning with a fever and, with no more urgent duties, accepted her invitation to stay the week.

That was when he met her son, Hayate, fourteen, like himself, intense and confident with a sly smile that threatened mischief that he never showed around any adults. Ryu mistrusted that smile at first, but, soon, he thrived on it. Ryu had never had a friend his own age before Hayate, someone to share the discoveries and frustrations of adolescence with. Ryu was the more prodigious at ninjitsu, but Hayate had a way of thinking that lit in fire in Ryu in a way he'd never known. Their adventures in the mountains were, in retrospect, tame compared to what life had thrown at them since, but the times he'd stolen to follow where Hayate led remained among his brightest memories of his youth.

Ryu would never walk in the mountains with his friend again. Hayate would never walk again, or practice ninjitsu, he might never sit up to meditate on his own, or draw a sword in Iai. No one was completely certain he would live. His spine was broken, his spinal cord punctured by splintered fragments of bone, and he had not awoken. When Ryu received the news, he had been unable to respond immediately. He had already accepted work as a favor to another friend, and his duties demanded his impartial attention.

Even with three days to reflect on his new paradigm in the back of his mind, the reality was difficult to accept. Death was no peril to a shinobi, but the idea of his best friend trapped within his own, helpless body as the years wore on seemed incomprehensible to Ryu.

When he arrived at Hayate's household, Ryu removed his boots at the genkan and went to pay his respects to Jōnin Shiden. The seventeenth leader of the Mugen Tenshin greeted him solemnly with the assurance that his son would have appreciated his coming. He spoke as if Hayate was already dead, but maybe, for Shiden, he might as well have been. The Jōnin had been ill several years, but always certain of his successor.

"He is in his room, if you wish to see him," Shiden told him when there was nothing else left to say. "Kasumi is with him."

"Thank you, Shiden-jōnin."

Ryu bowed to the elder shinobi before rising to leave. He moved silently through Hayate's home, unsure what he meant to do when he saw his friend. No conversationalist under the best circumstances, the idea of speaking to a man in a coma stretched Ryu's limited resources.

Ryu had prepared himself for the sight before him before he slid open the fusuma, one of the opaque panels that separated rooms within the home. Even so, it was humbling. Kasumi kneeled at her brother's side, her hands folded in her lap, a still bowl of water sitting at her side, a towel resting on the tatami mat between them. Hayate lay pale and silent beneath his kakebuton.

"Kasumi."

"Hayabusa-san."

The young kunoichi raised her eyes to meet Ryu's. She had the same amber eyes as her older brother, though wider, and more vulnerable. Hayate could shield his emotions so that even Ryu had a hard time guessing his mood. In contrast, Ryu read Kasumi easily, even now with her resolve of stoicism in the face of her family's tragedy. There was hurt in her eyes, apprehension, and sorrow, and there, too, was a coolness Ryu had never seen in her before, like the first, bitter cold front before the winter snows came.

Kasumi looked down at her brother as she spoke, again: "I wasn't there to help him."

Ryu considered her words, standing poised in the doorway with his hand against the fusuma. "Neither was I."

"Did Tōsama tell you how it happened?"

"Nothing more than I had already heard."

Kasumi glanced out the open shōji to the mountains beyond. Her gaze looked more distant than even those. Closing her eyes, she rose to her feet. "I'll let you have time with him. Even if he can't wake up, I'm sure he appreciates your coming." She met Ryu's eyes with a small, sad smile. They traded places, Ryu coming to kneel beside his friend and Kasumi heading towards the sliding partition.

She paused at the threshold. "You've heard about it, haven't you? Dead or Alive?"

Ryu watched the slow rise and fall of his friend's chest and the waxy pallor of his skin in the sunlight. He was still unsure what he was meant to do when they were alone. His green eyes darted up to catch Kasumi's parting glance. "You're going to be Jōnin of the Mugen Tenshin, soon. Don't take that lightly."

Kasumi's smile widened beneath her heartsick eyes. "Some of the geinin whisper the man who stole the Torn Sky Blast was preparing for it," she said, and left.

Ryu kneeled quietly next to his friend for the next few minutes, feeling awkward and useless. He frowned as he noticed faint perspiration appearing on his friend's brow, and touched his face with the back of his fingers to check his temperature. Brow furrowing, he wet the cloth Kasumi had left and wrung it out over the bowl. He gently daubed the damp fabric against Hayate's pallid brow and felt more like his presence was at least making some difference. After a halting pause, he spoke:

"Maybe you did the right thing, showing him the Torn Sky Blast. You saved your people's lives."

Ryu expected no reaction from his friend, and none was provoked. Hayate didn't have the raw, inherent power that powered the Dragon Ninja's ninjitsu, but his skill and technique were far stronger than all but a handful of the world's top combatants. Ryu couldn't imagine what extraordinary potency had allowed the assassin to assimilate the Tenjinmon's secret technique and throw Hayate aside like leftover waste. The idea itself turned his stomach.

Ryu remembered playing in the trees of the forest, testing out lanky, growing limbs; fishing in the river on lazy afternoons -- usually Ryu fishing while Hayate meditated; the spring they had competed for the attentions of the young Hayabusa kunoichi Yukiko, who was completely disinterested in both of them and ended up together with some geinin who was exceptional only at drinking and gambling at Cho-Han Bakuchi… after she had taken all their gifts and left them alone together, the brawl they'd gotten into over her had looked foolish. They could at least go to the river again, if Ryu carried him.

Ryu soaked and wrung the cloth again before cooling Hayate's chest and shoulders. "You'd rather watch, anyway. It won't be that different."

Talking still wasn't coming easily. It was against Ryu's nature to waste many words. He knew Hayate understood. It was enough to give Kasumi leave from her brother's side for at least an hour. Ryu knew, too, that she would leave him in the hands of few others, and had probably ate and slept in the room. He agreed with her sentimentality. It was the duty of the shinobi to leave all personal ties behind when on a mission, but, barring that geis, he saw no reason for Hayate to be left alone. His friend was well respected within the Mugen Tenshin village, and Ryu was sure that even if he was gone and Kasumi called away, someone else would willingly take up the charge.

Ryu wondered rarely what kind of man he would have been if not a shinobi, but he wondered, now. Would he have shaken when he first heard the news? Could he have cried? Years of schooling and training tempered his sorrow. The protection it offered him in other conditions became a liability, here, at his best friend's sickbed, contrasted with the freedom of expression in Kasumi's eyes and words. But, he wondered what kind of Jōnin she would make. Her ninpo was stronger than Hayate's, but the position took more than skill in ninjutsu. Perhaps Shiden would choose a different successor, but time was running short.

Ryu shook his head. As close as he was to the family, and although he considered himself on emergency call at the service of the clan, the internal affairs of the Tenjinmon were no business of his.

_Ryu remembered Hayate, a smudge of dirt on his cheek and that crafty smile on his lips. They had been sparring in the tree branches for two hours, and now they lay exhausted in the dry leaves on the forest floor. _

Hayate was staring at the slanting shafts of sunlight breaking through the forest canopy, and Ryu was watching him. "She was fat, anyway."

Ryu chuckled in rare laughter. It had been a good day.

"You ever kissed one?"

"A girl?"

"Yeah."

"No."

"I kissed her a lot out back of the weapons shed. All I could think was, 'She's kind of fat.'"

Ryu's good humor faded to a suspicious glare. It took Hayate a minute to sense the timbre of his silence. He must have realized, too, that it was too late to look nonchalant about it, because he played dumb, instead, meeting him with a face that said: So, you never kissed a girl, huh? How about that?

Ryu blew out a sigh and let his eyes wander somewhere else. So, while he'd been trying to respect Yukiko's right to choose between them, Hayate had been kissing her 'a lot.' He could hear the leaves rustle as Hayate shifted, then the Mugen Tenshin Jōnin's son was looking down over him soberly from up on his elbows. Ryu pretended to ignore him.

"It was just kissing," Hayate said, but far off, like he was thinking about something else. Then he climbed sideways, slipping an arm across Ryu's chest and looking down at him face on with that damn, sneaky little smile. Ryu could feel his weight on his chest and the heat of his body and he considered throwing him but he missed his chance because Hayate whispered "Like this" -- conspiratorial -- and kissed him and, even if he was being kissed by a guy, and maybe he was going to throw him in a minute, Ryu was a teenager, and his hormones didn't care who it was, so he let him kiss him, because he wanted to know how he'd kissed Yukiko, in case he felt like beating him up over it, later, while pretending to accidentally spar too rough.

Hayate's lips were slippery and soft and he stank like sweat, but that was all right, and Ryu kissed him back, trying to move his lips like he felt Hayate's moving, like practice, like sparring, and Ryu's body flushed with heat, but that was nothing like sparring at all. His vision was swimming when Hayate let him up, and Hayate's face hovered over his, contemplative, before his smile snuck back and Ryu, not wanting to be outdone, said "Like that, huh?" and they blew it off like it was nothing, like it was normal, but sometimes when Hayate was lying around Ryu thought about kissing him again, even though he never did, because even after he'd kissed a few girls he never found any that had kissed like Hayate.

"Don't die, you."

Ryu waited in silent meditation until Kasumi returned. She looked better when she came back. He hoped she had gone and read her fortune or sat beneath the trees outside or practiced her katas, because he knew she would kill herself for the sake of her brother but he knew she didn't have to, and Hayate wouldn't have wanted it, anyway. They shared a nod as they exchanged duties and Ryu left that place to return to his shop and his life and wait for news.

-----------------------

Iai (居合い) – the art of drawing the sword  
Jōnin (上忍) - ninja clan master  
Tōsama (父様) – (respected) Father  
Kakebuton (掛け布団) - futon comforter  
Shōji (障子) – sliding door with translucent paper windows  
Geinin (下忍) - gruntwork, low ninja


End file.
